Like the Pebble Steel before it, the Pebble Time Steel doesn't change the internals found in its plastic sibling, except for a larger battery, which will apparently provide this model with up to 10 days of use.

The Pebble Time still has almost a month to get more pre-orders on Kickstarter, but it's already passed the $10 million mark, which is the record set by the first Pebble. In preparation for what is sure to be a big launch for the company, the new v3.0 update of Pebble's SDK is now available. Developers can start building apps for the Time, and they'll work with the regular Pebbles in the meantime.

When the time came to unveil its second generation smartwatch, Pebble returned to the crowdfunding site where everything began. Setting the bar low, the company only wanted $500,000 to call the Pebble Time project, the name of its new watch, a success. Within half an hour, it had already reached a million dollars. Now the project sits over $10.5 million with 29 days left to go.

Can a grown-up company return to the kiddie pool of Kickstarter funding to help with its new product? Of course it can - this is how development works now! This morning the makers of Pebble announced Pebble Time, the company's second generation of Pebble hardware, launching exclusively through a Kickstarter funding campaign (like the record-breaking original two years ago). The company hit its modest $500,000 goal less than half an hour after posting the page.

Pebble's website is currently home to a big countdown clock that is tracking the hours between now and 10AM EST tomorrow, February 24th. At that time, the company is expected to unveil information about new hardware and software.

Today we've caught a glimpse of both. The company briefly hosted this image on its servers before taking it back down.

The image shows a black, rounder Pebble with a color display. The four buttons used to navigate the on-screen interface—one on the left and three on the right—remain present on this updated model.

The Pebble continues to chug along even with Android Wear garnering most of the limelight among the Android faithful. Today's Pebble update adds a few new features, some borrowed from Wear, and some that improve on it. You'll need the recently released v2.9 firmware and the just released app (v2.3), but it's quick to update.

Big tech companies are hesitant to admit when a competing platform offers something that they don't. But the folks at Pebble are more than ready to take advantage of the functionality introduced by Android Wear. The team has pushed out a beta that lets the Pebble not only interact with notifications, but respond to them in a manner akin to an Android Wear watch.

Instead of swiping from the right repetitively to access various options (as you would with Android Wear), Pebble lets you access different options using the three physical buttons available on the side of the watch.

For Android users, the Pebble Steel sits in a somewhat precarious position. It has the build quality of a designer watch, but it has the screen of something from what increasingly feels like a bygone era. The end result is something that looks premium and not-so-much at the same time, especially when lined up against its shinier Android Wear competitors on the store shelf.

But the Pebble Steel isn't a bad purchase, and Best Buy's currently willing to make it a better one.

The Pebble folks have announced a big update to the smartwatch that many wearers have been waiting a long time for. With version 2.1 of the Android companion app, users can receive notifications from any app they have on their device, rather than a few preset options, without having to turn to a third-party solution. People will have the ability to receive all notifications or select specific apps.

The update is only available to 10% of users today, but it will gradually roll out to more people running Android 4.3 or higher.

The Pebble used to be arguably the best smartwatch in the game, and if your primary concern is battery life or you want a ton of apps to play with right now, then it's still your best bet. But the competition has upped its game, and the black and white display of the Pebble Steel looks like a hard sell next to the colorful, circular one of the Moto 360.